The Clock

Chaotic-Tock is not just a clock gone cuckoo. It is a clock gone cuckoo with style.

We proudly present an item that will bring chaos and style to your home or office.
Here’s our promo video and a few more details…

Although this is a very common thing – a clock – the similarity with anything common ends here. This is a clock designed to draw attention and keep it. No matter how many times you’ve seen it, it will still require more than just a glimpse to tell the time.

Geeky but beautiful

The whole clock is made of stylish CNC laser cut plexiglass. Besides that, there is a bunch of other techy stuff inside.

The gears

Not many people realize that a true gear is not just a many-pointed star. In order to run smoothly, their teeth must be constructed very carefully. The edge of each tooth follows an involute of the base circle of the gear. If you take a closer look at each gear you will see that every one has its own, distinct set of teeth but different gears with the same module always form a perfect contact and run without stuttering (such as this über-primitive example).

We think there is a special kind of beauty in that and beauty should not go unnoticed. With the size of gears on Chaotic-Tock, it won’t.

The electronics

It’s not very common for a clock to have a microcontroller built in. Chaotic-Tock has a very capable one. ARM Cortex-M0 assures that everything is at the right time in the right place. Every single second it checks the internal Real Time Clock. Then it calculates gears’ positions, then rotates them to a specific angle.

By the way, you will never see a gear turn more than half a circle; the microcontroller calculates the optimal move for each change in gears position. However chaotic the clock might seem outside, everything is very neatly ordered inside!

There are 3 LED lights at the back side of Chaotic-Tock:

The first shows status of the clock.

The last shows errors. Hopefully, you will never see that turn on.

The middle one is a Second indicator. It lights up every second so that you know the clock is alive and kickin’. If you don’t need to know that or it is placed in a dark place, the light can be turned off if it starts to annoy you.